Chapter Text
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
(Derek Walcott, "Love After Love")
2022
The second they know the camera is off – the one from the documentary, obviously, since the ones from actual filming have been off for over an hour –, Reece slumps in the booth and rubs a hand over his face, jostling his glasses.
“You okay?” Steve asks. Annoyingly, he doesn’t ask it in that joking voice he’s used for the past month whenever he said it, imitating every single person in Reece’s life who has asked him this question recently, like they’re expecting a different answer every time.
Is he okay? Why the fuck does it matter? He’s got a job to do, whether he is or not.
But Steve asking it now feels different. And so Reece doesn’t treat it like a joke, either.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Yeah. Probably. Just tired.”
“Me, too,” Steve says. “I don’t know about you, but I’d really fancy skipping the wrap party and just having an early night.”
Reece’s lips twitch. “A quiet night in, you mean?”
“Maybe without the gruesome murder.”
“Shame,” Reece says, smiling properly now. “That would liven me up. Well, in a manner of speaking.”
“D’you want to leave, then?” Steve asks.
Reece takes a moment to think about it. Everyone around them is busy packing up equipment, but soon enough, they’ll stop doing that and start drinking.
A few crew members have already got bottles of beer in their hands, and someone has found a speaker and chose to only use it to play ABBA songs, for some reason. It’s going to be a late night.
What Reece would like to do is to go home and sleep for fifteen hours. But he also knows that what Steve would like to do is to stay and fucking- mingle, or whatever it is Steve does at parties while Reece makes awkward conversations with people he’s sure would rather be talking to Steve.
There’s almost certainly going to be another party when post-production is finished. It’ll be different, though. Won’t take place right after their final-ever scene together for the show.
Reece sighs and tries to look nice and friendly and less like he’d rather gauge out his own eyes with a spoon than to stay here another ten minutes. “Nah, you’re fine,” he says. “Let’s stay.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll cope,” Reece says dryly. “And if I can’t, I’ll just hang myself with one of these cables that I’ve been tripping over all day.”
“You can do what you like,” Steve says, “since we’ve wrapped filming now.”
Reece laughs. “That’s right! I’m not needed anymore. Christ, is that what it feels being dumped in a retirement home by your cold and uncaring relatives?”
“Not that far off, now,” Steve points out. “Remember when the funniest punchline we could think of was someone being 48?”
Someone from the crew calls Steve’s name then, and Reece waves him off.
He ought to get up, too, get something to drink and find someone to talk to whom he hasn’t known for thirty years. He stays seated a while longer, though, thinking about what Steve said.
Reece is 53 now, five years older than Pauline. A number so high it seemed unthinkable, when they were in their twenties and writing that joke. It’s not quite as funny anymore.
Across the room, Steve is talking to two of the guys from the prop department, a paper plate with a piece of cake in his hand. For all that hates dressing up, he really does look good in that tuxedo.
They both do, especially now that Reece has dyed his hair. They had an argument about that last week, before they started shooting the final episode.
“You realise that the whole idea of playing ourselves is that people are expecting to see us?” Steve had said.
“They aren’t, though,” Reece had replied. “Not really. When they picture me in their heads, do you think they’re picturing me with grey hair and wrinkles?”
“I do,” Steve said, but Reece had stopped paying attention at that point, his mind made up. He appreciates what Steve was trying to do, but he’s right about this, he knows he is. It’s different for Steve, who’d been almost fully grey by the time he turned forty.
So Reece had dyed his hair, and now they won’t have an episode going out where he looks like he’s let himself go, which should feel good. It doesn’t.
Reece wonders if he’s going to get depressed, now that they’ve finished the show. It’s what everyone expects, what every single person who asked him if he’s alright had secretly hoped for.
He remembers being 28, 33, 35, thinking every time that this might be it, this might’ve been the last project before it all comes crashing down and he has to move back to Hull and prove that his dad was right about what he said the night before Reece left for drama school.
Every time, he’d kept going. Did other projects, took other roles, wrote more scripts. Him and Steve literally have another project right now, taking the show to the stage like they’d always said they would.
But after that? The vastness of that empty space in his calendar, blank pages over blank pages, looms over him, terrible and daunting.
“Reece?” one of the stagehands asks, calling out to him from a few tables away. “Do you want some of this cake?” She’s holding a large knife smeared with buttercream and frosting.
“Maybe later,” Reece says, knowing this to be a lie. She probably knows, too; people learn a lot about each other on a filmset.
He really ought to get up. He’s going to, in a minute. If he doesn’t, Steve’s going to come back over and sit with him for the rest of the evening, and Reece isn’t going to be strong enough to send him away.
His gaze falls on the hare that someone had put on the table.
They’ve got a collection of them at home, there’s one in the living room, one on the fridge, one in their bedroom. One in the office, obviously. This one has been used for two series now; Reece can’t remember what happened to the last one.
He runs his finger over the hare’s ears. In their office, he’s got a long piece of paracord he fiddles with when he’s thinking. It appeared on the desk one day after he’d accidentally stabbed himself with the butterfly knife he’d used before. The last day in the office before filming started, Steve pretended to have hanged himself with it. Good bit of fun.
Never thought he’d be here, 30 years ago.
He wonders what that version of himself that wrote that joke about Pauline being 48 would say about him now. Wonders if he’d be impressed, or disappointed, or just shocked that Reece has gotten old, older than 48.
From the corner of his eye, he can Steve watching him. Any second now, he’ll start heading over here, so Reece finally stands up.
Filming is over and they all have the weekend off before post-production starts on Monday. He can pretend to be sociable for one more night.
*
1989
It’s 3 am and they’ve got classes in the morning, but neither of them has suggested going to bed yet.
Reece, of course, would never do that, anyway. It always falls to Mark or Steve – or, like now, when Mark has got other plans, it just falls to Steve – to call it a night.
Over the past eighteen months, Steve has noticed a few patterns about Reece.
He rarely suggests outings himself, but always says yes when he’s invited, including one time he was sick with the flu.
He’s got an uncanny ability to do impressions of people including their classmates, their tutors, his brothers and his mum, but never his dad.
When someone compliments him on anything, he gets that strange look in his eyes, like he’s trying to figure out if it’s a joke.
Most recently, Steve has noticed that Reece doesn’t enjoy going to pubs.
He’s never outright said so, ‘course he hasn’t, but he tenses up there in a way he never does when they’re getting drunk in one of their rooms.
Steve attributes it to Reece’s social awkwardness at first – there’s people at pubs –, but then, Reece is fine in all the other common spaces. Not sociable by any means, but fine. He doesn’t seem fine in pubs, by comparison.
So tonight, since Mark is gone, anyway, Steve suggested they just get something to drink and stay at his room.
“It’s the pub quiz tonight, though,” Reece had protested.
“Our team’s got a three-week winning streak,” Steve had said. “Let’s give the others a chance for once.”
Reece had clenched his jaw then, the way he does when he’s debating with himself over whether he’s going to say something unkind or not.
‘Or not’ had won, because in the end, he’d just agreed to Steve’s idea and changed the subject, leaving Steve to wonder what comment he’d swallowed down.
Now, they’re sitting on Steve’s bed, backs propped up against the wall, passing a bottle of liquor between them. Reece is drunker than Steve is, his cheeks red, his gaze a little unfocused as he talks. Steve’s heart is swelling with fondness for him.
Steve opens a new packet of cigarettes and Reece holds out his hand, not even bothering to ask.
“Next year, you’ll find someone else to bum fags off,” Steve teases. As soon as the words leave his mouth, he realises it was the wrong thing to say. Reece’s face has already closed off.
“I will, yeah.” Reece doesn’t say that he’s got no intentions of talking to anyone next year, but Steve hears it anyway.
He’s still faintly impressed Reece managed to befriend them. He hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but in retrospect, it’s quite out of character for Reece to have approached him at all.
It’s a good thing he had, though. Steve doesn’t like thinking what his last year and a half would have been like without Reece. Likes the thought of Reece’s upcoming year without him and Mark even less.
Their graduation has been looming for months, and they haven’t talked about it, not really, but Steve has been getting the distinct impression that Reece is viewing this as some sort of personal betrayal. Which is absurd, but then, that’s Reece for you.
“Hey,” he says, gently nudging Reece’s shoulder with his own. “We’ll stay in touch.”
“Yeah,” Reece repeats, and again, Steve can hear what he doesn’t say. No, we won’t. Because national phone calls are expensive and Steve plans to move to London, a 3-hour train ride. That’s expensive, too. More expensive than either of them will rationally be able to afford.
“We’ll come to your graduation, at least,” Steve says, and this, he really does mean. “Little Reeson finally graduating! I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Fuck off, don’t call me that, you prick,” Reece says, but he’s smiling a little. “Making it sound like there’s this huge age gap! You’re only a year older.”
“And a lot wiser,” Steve says, and Reece shoves at his shoulder. “If it’s making you angry, Reece, it’s because you know it’s true.”
Reece shoves at him again, but he’s laughing. Steve’s going to miss that, come autumn: making Reece laugh.
Reece’s laugh turns into a yawn that he badly tries to hide. Steve smiles. “Let’s go to bed, eh?” he suggests gently. “We need to be up in a few hours.”
“Fine.” Reece lets out another yawn.
It’s a ten-minute walk from Steve’s dorm to Reece’s, not very long at all. But it’s late, and dark, and earlier when they were walking here, they’d both nearly had a heart attack when something had jumped out at them from the dark that turned out to be nothing more than a particularly fat hare.
Steeve knows that nothing happened, but it doesn’t stop him from looking at Reece, sleepy and tipsy and struggling to keep his eyes open, and saying, “You can stay here, if you like.”
“Bed’s a bit small for that,” Reece points out. “Nah, it’s alright. Just going to have a quick lie-down and then I’ll be good to go home. Wake me up in five minutes, yeah?”
He curls up on Steve’s bed like a cat, his breathing evening out within seconds.
Steve pulls the covers over him and resists the urge to do anything else, like petting Reece’s hair.
He watches the clock on the opposite wall, counting down the minutes, knowing even as he does so that he won’t have the heart to wake Reece from his slumber.
It’s going to end like it always does: with Steve digging out his sleeping mat from underneath his bed and waking up in the morning with a sore back. He doesn’t mind, though. Not really.
He’s going to do that in a minute. Just going to shut his eyes for one moment first, Reece a warm weight next to him, dead to the world.
He wonders what life’s going to be like a year from now, for both of them. If Reece, against all odds, really will have found another person who gives him cigarettes and lets him sleep in their bed.
If Steve is going to manage to be normal about it if that does happen.
If they’ll be okay. If they’ll still be friends.
Steve falls asleep like he befriended Reece: it happens before he’s had time to even consider it.
*
PUB QUIZ every THURSDAY at 8:30 pm. 1st Prize: 20£ BAR TAB!
Section Three: Mythology
- Which beast native to Africa is also associated with the Egyptian god of the underworld?
- Which mythical beast appears on the Welsh national flag?
- According to legend, the sighting of which animal used to make fishermen refuse to set sail after glimpsing it?
(…)
*
2022
They’re supposed to be sleeping in today, but Reece wakes up at six anyway, his body still attuned to the gruelling film schedule.
He’s about to bury his head in his pillow and try to fall asleep again when he realises that he’s alone in bed, Steve nowhere to be found.
Neither of them are particularly early risers, so either Steve went for a wee or he snuck out to have a fag on their balcony, hoping Reece wouldn’t notice.
Reece snatches one of Steve’s jumpers from the chair in the corner and leaves their bedroom, feeling like the world has wronged him for making him get up at this hour.
To his surprise, the door to the bathroom is open and the door to the balcony is firmly shut. Steve is nowhere to be found.
“Steve?” Reece calls out, raising his voice. “Steve, are you there?” He’s met with the sort of silence that feels all-encompassing.
Annoyed, Reece checks his phone – three messages of people on the crew asking if he’s alright, none from Steve – and then the fridge.
Sure enough, there’s a note taped to it, scrawled on in Steve’s handwriting.
Couldn’t sleep, so popped out to the office. Be back in time for breakfast x
That’s bloody typical. ‘In time for breakfast’ could mean any time between 8 and 11, which in turn means that Reece is going to feel bad if he makes coffee now and it goes cold.
He knows that Steve won’t care, but he also knows that Steve knows that Reece will feel bad, so this whole thing feels like a mind game. Reece throws the note in the bin and decides to go back to bed.
He wakes again when he hears voices. Steve’s, obviously, he’d recognise that one anywhere.
There’s one other, though – no, two others. One other? Reece frowns, wondering if this is an early onset symptom of something.
He abandons that thought as irritation takes over. It’s only half seven; why is Steve talking to anyone this early in the morning? Why’d he invite them to their flat? Is he expecting Reece to come out and make small talk?
He checks his phone again. One message from his mum, asking if he’s alright. Two messages from Steve, saying coming home now, don’t freak out and, sent a minute later, there’s been a twist.
“Fucking great,” Reece mutters to himself. It’s not a good sign that Steve’s already quoting from their show. Hasn’t even been one day.
He hopes they won’t become those people obsessed with their own work, talking about it at every television and podcast appearance they do, years after everyone’s stopped giving a shit.
He’s still wearing Steve’s jumper over his pyjama. Steve knows that Reece doesn’t like anyone seeing him before he’s gone through his morning routine of looking presentable again, and still he’s brought people over to their flat.
There’d better be an emergency to justify this, although, Reece thinks, if there’s been a car crash or something, personally he just would’ve called them an ambulance and be done with it.
A knock on their bedroom door. Steve never knocks.
“What is it?” Reece says.
The door opens and Steve comes in. He looks pale. Shaken. “You’d better come out,” he says. “We’ve got visitors.”
“Well, that’s unnecessarily cryptic. Is it ghosts?” Reece asks.
“It’s not ghosts. It’s- well, you’ll see.”
“Fine,” Reece says, annoyed all over again. “I’ll just get changed and-“
“I think it’s best if you come right now,” Steve interrupts and adds, with one of those knowing little smirks that Reece has always resented, “I have it on reasonable authority that our visitors won’t care what you look like.”
There’s not much to say to that, at least not if Reece isn’t prepared for an argument. He sighs, long and exaggerated, as he follows Steve into the hallway.
“Go on, then. But someone better be…bleeding…” He falls silent, every rational thought flying out of his head as soon as he rounds the corner.
Because there, sat on their sofa, are them.
Reece stops so abruptly that Steve walks into him, letting out a little surprised grunt, but Reece ignores him. All his focus is on the two people on the couch.
They look a lot younger. As young as those earliest pictures they’ve got of their time together at Bretton Hall, which don’t really do anything for Reece but which Steve adores, for some reason.
The Steve on the couch is wearing a horrible striped jumper Reece remembers giving away to charity about a decade ago, and the Reece next to him is dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that’s too big for him.
They look different; ‘course they do. But it’s undeniably them.
They haven’t seen him yet. They’re having a quiet conversation – or, well, Steve is quiet, while Reece’s younger self is getting visibly agitated.
Slowly, Reece turns back to Steve – the older one, the real one. He doesn’t ask a question, because there are no questions he could reasonably ask. As always, Steve hears what he doesn’t say, shrugging sheepishly.
“They just turned up in the office. I didn’t know what- once I realised that this wasn’t an elaborate prank, I thought it’d be best to bring them here. Figure it out together.”
Reece looks from his Steve to the Steve on the couch, and back again. “Slap me.”
“What?”
“Just so I know I’m not dreaming. Slap me.”
“I think the standard way of phrasing that is asking someone to pinch you,” Steve points out. Then he throws an uncharacteristically nervous glance at their counterparts before whispering, “I’m not going to slap you! What if they see us?”
“So? They’ve already seen you, anyway!”
“No, I meant- they’ll think I’m mistreating you.” Steve looks like just saying that out loud pained him greatly.
Reece rolls his eyes. “Fine. Fucking- pinch me, then.”
Steve reaches out with surprising reluctance for a man who had no trouble choking Reece to the point of bruising just last month. That’s as good as sign as any that Reece isn’t dreaming. The Steve of his dreams is always a lot more brutal than the real one.
“The fuck are you two doing?” a familiar voice asks before Steve can actually touch him. They both turn to see that Reece’s young self has jumped to his feet and is now staring at them with a mixture of shock and disgust. Well. Staring at Reece, to be exact. “Oh, God. It’s me.”
“Thanks,” Reece says flatly.
“Reece-“ the two Steves say at the same time.
“Don’t,” the two Reeces snap. There’s a moment wherein everyone glares at each other.
Then, Reece’s horrible younger self crosses his arms and says accusingly, “Did you dye your hair? Is that my future? Am I going to be in my mid-sixties and freak out over turning grey?”
“Fuck off, I’m fifty-three,” Reece says.
“Yeah, and you bloody well look it, too,” his younger self says. “Christ, that means I look it.”
Next to him, the older Steve snorts. “I’d forgotten how horrid you were when you were younger,” he says, eyes twinkling. “Absolutely awful! I used to have to apologise for you every party we went to.”
“No, you didn’t,” Reece says immediately.
“I did!”
Reece’s young self now rounds on the younger Steve, who hasn’t done much of anything yet, other than staring. “Is that true?” he demands.
The younger Steve looks alarmed. “Well.”
“Is that why you’ve stopped dragging me to pubs?!”
The younger Steve visibly winces. “It’s not,” he says, but he doesn’t offer any other explanation.
Reece tries to cast his mind back. Did they stop going to pubs, him and Steve? He supposes they did. He’s always sort of assumed this was a natural symptom of them getting older, but that theory breaks down in the face of both Steves looking uncomfortable.
“Alright,” Steve says loudly in a transparent way to break the tension, “who wants some tea? Reece, come help me in the kitchen.”
Reece’s younger self scowls. “You can’t order me around.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Reece says, “he meant me. Out of my way.”
He shoves past his young self, who gives him a hostile look the kind of which Reece only gives to people he thinks ought to kill themselves on the spot, and wishes the kitchen had a door he could slam shut. As it is, he just leans against the counter where he’s out of their young selves’ direct line of sight and closes his eyes.
What the fuck. What the fuck.
While he’s busy panicking, Steve moves through the kitchen with long-practiced ease, turning on the kettle and retrieving four mugs from the cupboard.
“What are you so cheerful about?” Reece asks sourly. “We’ve got two imposters in our living room.”
“They aren’t imposters,” Steve says, sounding calmer than Reece has felt. Calmer than Reece has ever felt in his life, probably. “They’re us.”
“That’s even worse! How’re we going to get rid of them? We can’t exactly kill them, we’d be killing ourselves.”
“Let’s not resort to murder quite yet,” Steve says. “They got here on their own somehow; they’ll leave on their own, too. We just have to be patient.”
“I don’t understand you sometimes,” Reece says, and Steve laughs the way he always does when he thinks Reece has said something Steve deems as ‘in character’, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Normally, this is where would Steve kiss him on the cheek (Reece reckons this would be considered ‘in character’ for Steve), but instead, Steve just pours hot water into the mugs and adds tea bags, making Reece feel like an idiot for waiting to be kissed, and also making him cross with Steve for making him feel like an idiot.
“He is awful, though, isn’t he?” Reece says, quiet but insistent. “What a little prick.”
“Be nice,” Steve scolds gently. “He’s you, after all.”
“Exactly! That’s how I know!”
“He’s only twenty,” Steve says. “They told me when we were at the office. They’re both still in university. Babies!”
“What do you mean, they told you? How much time did you spend with them before bringing them here?”
Steve shrugs. “I don’t know, maybe an hour or so? I found them pretty much as soon as I entered, asleep on the couch. We almost gave each other a heart attack.”
“I can’t believe this,” Reece complains. “What did you even talk about for that long? I can’t imagine I had a single interesting thing to say at that age.”
“We had a good chat, actually.” Steve puts sugar into one of the mugs, then hesitates. “Do you remember how you used to like your tea back then?”
“No,” Reece says, “but I remember how you liked yours. Two sugars.”
Steve’s face lights up. “Reeson! How sweet of you.”
“Only ‘cause you bullied me into making you tea so many fucking times,” Reece says, refusing to take the credit for something that’s the direct result of having been a pushover. “And stop fucking calling me that.”
“We need a way of telling you apart,” Steve says in that tone he only ever adopts when he thinks he’s being the reasonable one – so, basically always.
“What, one of us being grey and wrinkled wasn’t enough of a clue for you?” Reece says. “Don’t answer that.” He grabs two mugs (one black, one with two sugars) and stalks back into the living room, handing one of them to the other Steve and keeping the other for himself as he retreats to the armchair in the corner.
“Thanks,” the young Steve says, looking surprised. Next to him, young Reece is clearly sulking, but Steve is looking around the room like he’s searching for clues.
Reece watches him for a moment, following his gaze as it lands on the bookshelf, their outdated DVD collection and their even more outdated video collection that neither of them have brought themselves to donate to charity yet, the photos of them that Steve put up on the wall.
“What’s that?” Steve asks, pointing at the hare nestled in between two books. “There was one in your office, too.”
“No idea,” Reece says. “We’ve been trying to get rid of it, but it just follows us everywhere.”
The younger Steve frowns.
“I’m kidding. It’s from a project,” Reece explains. “Can’t tell you any more, or else we’ll have to kill you, obviously.”
Steve tears his eyes away from it and refocuses on Reece. He looks so young, Reece thinks. They both do. Younger than he remembers him and Steve ever being.
“Steve told us that you two work together,” Steve says, apparently not sharing his older counterpart’s worries about telling anyone apart. “What kind of work?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Is it to do with acting?”
“No, you both wasted your time on drama school and are working at the grocery store now,” Reece says. “What do you think?” Also, where the hell is Steve? How long can carrying two mugs possibly take?
“Don’t be a cunt,” the younger Reece snaps. “He was only asking!”
“Yeah, and I’m only telling him.”
Reece watches a 21-year-old Steve reach out to a 20-year-old Reece, placing his hand on the back of Reece’s neck in a motion Reece is intimately familiar with. It’s not obvious from an outside perspective, but he knows that right now, Steve is applying gentle pressure. It used to calm him down; it still does.
The younger Reece lets it happen, just like Reece has been for over thirty years, his shoulders slumping slightly. Steve whispers something in his ear, too quiet for Reece to make out, and he’s irritated enough by that that he cranes his neck, looking for his version of Steve.
Right on cue, Steve comes in, no tea to be seen. Instead, he’s bundled into his coat. “None of us have had breakfast yet,” he says cheerfully, “so I thought it’d be nice to eat together, only I’m not sure we’ve got enough food. Who wants to come to the store with me and help carry groceries? Reece?”
Reece rises, but Steve isn’t looking at him. He’s looking at-
“He means me,” Reece’s younger self says to him, already following after Steve like a little puppy. Christ.
Reece sinks back into the armchair. He looks at the younger Steve, who gives him a wan smile. “Not how you thought your morning would go, eh?” he asks.
Reece sighs. “Do you fancy a round of Scrabble, then?”